The Republican establishment just sold us out. Mitch McConnell received his $3 billion of silver to betray the base and the grassroots, via an amendment authored by Lamar Alexander. They're such sluts for a good porking, and their explanation strains credulity: we had to spend $3 billion on a dam to make sure the taxpayers didn't lose $160 million. That's Washington math at its finest.

President Obama made one concession: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius will certify that income verification measures are in place to verify eligibility for Obamacare subsidies. That certification will consist of a letter to Congress, and it will be followed by GAO reports that reveal how much of a liar Kathleen Sibelius is. And yes, that's right: those income verification measures weren't already in place.

It takes $2.9 billion to put Mitch McConnell on his knees before President Obama, whoring himself out and betraying his Kentucky constituents. There's no relief for the good people of Kentucky or their families, who will see their premiums go up and their available providers go down. Their senator didn't bother to insist that President Obama face the music for his unconstitutional and illegal delay of the employer mandate, or the out of pocket limits, until 2015. There's good money to be made betting on another delay in 2015.

This is war. We're not going to stand by as the whores in Washington betray us and their constituents to send money to their crony sugar daddies, including the pharmaceutical companies who stand to make an estimated $35 billion in profits from Obamacare. We're not going to stand by while insurance companies charge their policyholders huge premium increases for out of pocket limits that won't be in place until 2015. We're going to burn Mitch McConnell and his parliament of whores at the stake in 2014 and 2016. That's right, we're coming in multiple election cycles for revenge.

Washington might not be helping you, or working families, but it's damn sure taking care of its own. Take recently deceased Senator Frank Lautenberg's widow, whose worth is $56 million: the Senate made sure she got another $174,000 of your money as a final payout. They did this while you're struggling to make ends meet, because what's another $174,000 of somebody else's money among millionaire politicians and their families?

These 81 whores curbstomped liberty and defecated on the Constitution yet again tonight. We aren't going to forget. We're coming in 2014, and they will hear us coming. They will remember this day and rue it, and we will pour forth the fires of your wrath upon their heads. We're not running away, and we are not beaten. This is but one battle, and we are turning tonight's defeat into a historic triumph.

Every dollar you contribute to us is a bullet aimed at the heart of the status quo in Washington, a bullet aimed at the parliament of whores and traitors who sold you out tonight. While the Senate did not respect our will tonight, they will fear our will in the primaries and they will know our resolve in the general election. We are coming, and we are never going to stop until we take down every last one of these 81 whores.

You aren't funding a political campaign. You're funding a revolution. Your donations are history-making ammunition to execute those who spat in your faces tonight with their vote. It's time to take these whores and traitors out. Donate today, and know that your dollars will rain down like mortars on those who betrayed us tonight in 2014. A season of vengeance is upon us, and it is time for the establishment to reap what it has sown.

Donate today, and destroy those who are destroying our country from within with increased debt and crony deals. Donate here todayThank You,Dustin StocktonCo-Founder

Henninger: Obama Romneyizes the RepublicansThe president is doing the same thing to Ted Cruz and the tea party that he did to the 1%.

By DANIEL HENNINGER

One of the more compelling finds in the opinion-polling swamps is that most people would like to see the entire Congress replaced. A more modest proposal: Let's replace all the Republicans in Congress with their children or grandchildren. Bring in the 15-year-olds. How could it get worse?

From the House to the Senate, the Republicans look dazed and confused. Three weeks ago, Ted Cruz stood in the Senate chamber for nearly a day, looking like a hero. Today, with the GOP brand in a vertical dive, he looks like a Bozo balloon.

What do children know that the Republicans in Congress don't know? The kids know, because it is the mother's milk of their battery-powered lives, that if you don't recognize shifts in the mighty flows of information, you will be swept aside, abandoned. You will be BlackBerry BB.T -0.48% .

For all the changes in information delivery, not much ever changes for the GOP's messaging skills.

Wind back to the 2012 presidential election. Recall how after it was over, the GOP promised that it would duplicate the incredible modern messaging machine the Obama team created across every available new-information platform. That delivery system was why across four years Barack Obama kept hammering "the 1%" and "the wealthiest." He was feeding the machine that was emailing, texting and tweeting this propaganda to targeted audiences.

Now suddenly comes a marketing ploy from the GOP's backbenches: "Defund ObamaCare." This idea was supposed to rally the nation against the Affordable Care Act. So if you were to ask students in marketing at the local community college what they thought of "Defund ObamaCare," what do you guess they might say? They'd say, absent the product, it sounds like a niche strategy with a low sales ceiling. Defund ObamaCare is now the Republicans' New Coke.

Enlarge ImageimageimageChad Crowe

Want a look at how a pro is spinning the Washington mess? Punch into Twitter.com and type "Barack Obama" into the search window. Click on "Barack Obama," next to the "End This Now" logo. The Obama tweets the past week have been fairly amazing. As in the presidential campaign against Mitt Romney, the Twitter feeds going out in the name of the president of the United States are virtually wall-to-wall propaganda.

Barack Obama: "If the debt ceiling isn't raised by Thursday, America could face an economic shutdown." This from the man who accuses the GOP of "manufacturing crises."

Everyone recalls the 2012 campaign's carpet bombing of "the wealthiest," even after they'd been shelled with a tax increase. Barack Obama has found—actually, it was handed to him—a scapegoat analogous to "the wealthiest" and "the banks" for his campaign to suppress votes for GOP candidates in the 2014 elections. It's "tea party Republicans."

Barack Obama: "Tea Party Republicans are threatening an economic shutdown. Tell them to #EndThisNow."

Barack Obama: "The #TeaPartyShutdown is harming small businesses. Say you've had #EnoughAlready."

Wednesday's first Obama tweet: "Day 16 of the #TeaPartyShutdown. This can't continue—Congress needs to #EndThisNow."

This isn't routine partisan noise. The Obama Twitter account lists 38,258,000 followers. Unless some of these are fake, that's nearly 30% of the total popular vote in 2012. All through the week, this number rose as the site poured forth boiling oil.

Virtually every Obama tweet demonizes the tea party. Last week, within minutes of the collapse of the Obama-Boehner talks, the tweeting robot called "Barack Obama" had hung the collapse on the "tea party."

Wednesday morning (with even the New York Post cover depicting Uncle Sam going over Niagara Falls on the "Brink of Disaster"), the machinery that runs @BarackObama rolled into view. It's the former Obama re-election apparatus, which has shape-shifted into a 501(c)(4) group called Organizing for Action.

From the Barack Obama Twitter feed at 10 a.m.: "Be a part of @OFA'S Twitter takeover and tell Congress to #EndThisNow."

Republicans complain constantly that the media "lets him get away with it." The media is floating down the electric river. No, they—the message-impoverished Republicans—let him get away with it. The Washington GOP is now a political Gulliver, tied down by tweets and twerps.

A month ago, before the congressional Republicans' General Custer Caucus used "Defund ObamaCare" to vote themselves into their current, bullet-riddled fort, the Obama characterization of the entire GOP as "tea party Republicans" would have been a pathetic stretch. He was the one being laughed at by the whole world for his vanishing red lines in Syria and a foreign policy that even his own defense secretary described as "swinging from vine to vine."

Not anymore. Barack Obama is Romneyizing the Republicans. He's doing to Ted Cruz and the House Republicans what he did to Mitt Romney and the 1%. It may be voter brainwashing, but in the expanded media age in which we all marinate, it works.

Someone in the tea party outside the Beltway had better wake up and smell the smoke. The great nemesis has done it again: He's turning them into political toast.

Karl Rove also has a piece in the WSJ today attacking the failed tea party strategy. In the case of Henninger it is easy to tell the only people standing up to do more. In the case of all who say they oppose Obamacare but attack the tea party strategy, please tell us the other way of stopping this before it is too entrenched to ever be dismantled. They don't have an answer.

Ted Cruz and the tea party had this right. They didn't have the support of their colleagues at the start, or at the end, but at least they gave them the opportunity to take one last stand.

In a short time the majority of Hispanics will rely on Obamacare and its subsidies, just to single out one key demographic group. And just like SSI, SNAP, Section 8, etc, Americans on the first and second rungs of the ladder will need to keep their income and work efforts permanently low in order to maintain their subsidy. We will soon be arguing over who can tax, borrow and spend the most to win over all these votes. For what? To repeal Obamacare?

Instead of a simple rear guard defensive retreat like establishment Republicans I prefer a guerilla resistance like the Tea Party. Hit the enemy where one can. As hard as possible. Fight back. Not as Hannity described simply, "manage defeat".

Reading on Lenin and Stalin they were essentially the same thing - against Tsarist Russia. They both fought their whole lives to gain power. I don't admire their use of terror and lies, and murder, and robbery. But I admire their persistence, their single minded agenda.

Neither was about money. It was all political. Though the politburo members did later become more about money and power for power's sake. Though they had to pretend they were not like evil capatilists.

This is a pretty good analogy. Only the tea party jumped out. The establishment Republicans, moderate Dems, majority of women, young voters, Hispanics, and many other groups are still basking in the increasing temperatures.

The right is like the frog in that famous experiment who lets himself get cooked to death so long as the temperature of the water rises so gradually that no one change is big enough to cause him to jump out of the pot. My hypothesis is that ObamaCare cranked up the temperature in the pot too fast, and the frog realized the water was boiling and jumped out.

The important part of this theory is that it explains why the Tea Party base of the right has become so radicalized. They're not reacting to this year's increase in the size of government, or even the past five years. They're reacting to decades' worth of increasing government, all at once.

Others are making similar observations. Brit Hume explains what the Tea Party got out of the shutdown.

"In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded.

"They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew. And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy.

"They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they'll try anything to bring that about. And if some of those things turn out to be reckless and doomed, well, so be it."

Rush Limbaugh's reaction to the shutdown validates this observation.

"I want to go back to the lady on the phone who says this doesn't feel right. What's happening here to the country just doesn't feel right. You know what's happened here? You know what this feels like, folks? I'll tell you exactly what it feels like to me. You tell me if this isn't close. It feels like we've lost a war to a communist country. It's almost like there's been a coup. There's been a peaceful coup. The media has led this coup, and the Democrats have taken over with popular support. We're getting policies and implementations and things that were never, ever part of this country's design and founding."

So happy predictions on the left that "the Republican fever has broken" are likely to be disappointed.

The other reason why ending the shutdown standoff is a victory for Republicans is that it allows them to shift attention to a development they didn't anticipate when they began the shutdown: the implosion of ObamaCare. Perhaps it is fitting that an administration whose ideal woman is a welfare-state-dependent web designer should see its signature initiative fail because of incompetent website design.

William Kristol declares, probably correctly, that this is the real news of October, which will be remembered long after the shutdown has faded from memory. And the consequences of ObamaCare's problems will reverberate for much longer.

Michael Barone runs down the consequences:

"You need the exchanges to enroll enough young healthy people to subsidize those who are sick and old, which is one of the central features of Obamacare.

"Otherwise premiums shoot up and up, pushing others out of the system—a death spiral that can continue year after year.

"'At what point,' [Megan McArdle] asks, 'do we admit that the system just isn't working well enough, roll it back and delay the whole thing for a year?' She suggests that if the system can't enroll 50 percent of its users by November 1, such a hugely drastic step would be in order."

Well, the initial numbers are in, and only a fraction of those eligible for ObamaCare have been able to enroll. So there is a good chance that the administration will have to delay ObamaCare after all, giving the radical House Republicans exactly what they wanted from the shutdown. The Republicans might just win after all.

"Michelle Obama's garden is back to being weeded and cared for now that the government has reopened."--------------How do they get away with calling these functions of government non-essential? She could have lost a whole season of Halloween pumpkins. As required in Article 8?

"Assassinate the f----- n----- and his monkey children," Manson commented on his own post, according to a screen shot uploaded by Facebook group "Americans Against the Tea Party" and relayed by Your Black Politics blog.

"Assassinate the f----- n----- and his monkey children," Manson commented on his own post, according to a screen shot uploaded by Facebook group "Americans Against the Tea Party" and relayed by Your Black Politics blog.

"Assassinate the f----- n----- and his monkey children," Manson commented on his own post, according to a screen shot uploaded by Facebook group "Americans Against the Tea Party" and relayed by Your Black Politics blog.

The Tea Party and Republican parties have to move the topic beyond race; the agenda is all Americans.

BTW BD, the guy once ran as a Democrat and now calls himself a libertarian.

"BTW BD, the guy once ran as a Democrat and now calls himself a libertarian."

I don't follow you here. The Tea Party is supposed to be the libertarian wing of the GOP, is it not? He says he is a follower of Ron Paul, who ran as a Republican. Strom Thurmond ran as a Democrat too....

"I don't follow you here. The Tea Party is supposed to be the libertarian wing of the GOP, is it not?

CCP,

I don't see the Tea Party as the wing of another party. It is a separate party and I don't see it as the Libertarian wing though it is closer to that in ideology.

My point is that the jerk who made this statement runs for three different parties. If he could get elected he would be just fine being a Democrat. And we would not have heard it from the Huffington Post.

In any case the Tea Party does indeed need to vet its candidates better. No disagreement about that.

This is a wet dream for liberals and obviously for the media. They have been dying to find a poster boy for right extremism. I wonder how many assassination statements are discovered everyday - for any President. This one is exciting because of the opportunity to say tea party with it, though of course there is no Tea Party and 'they' never endorsed or elected him. He had a measly 4% of the vote for city office in a city we never heard of. He took back his bad words and, unlike some other kooks, didn't actually shoot anyone. What were the political views of John Hinckley? Who held other anti-Reaganites accountable for that lone gunman? Same for Kathleen Soliah, Bill Ayers, etc. The view of the kook doesn't add anything to the discussion of the issues.

Meanwhile, real issues linger unpursued and unresolved. I will patiently await Huffington Post coverage of the peer reviewed Burkhauser study, June 2013, refuting everything on income inequality ever published on their pages. http://www.nber.org/papers/w19110 That would be as easy to find as this, "a screen shot uploaded by Facebook group "Americans Against the Tea Party" and relayed by Your Black Politics blog".

BTW, I'm glad it was posted; look at the reaction it stirred. And Huff Post does have serious stories from time to time. Good to know what others are reading.

My thought is that there are racist element across the political spectrum. This includes the Tea Party.

There is now a coordinated campaign to sink the Tea Party as a socially acceptable position by a) making shit up and b) finding occasional outliers like the bigoted idiot under discussion here this morning.

What to do?

My thoughts:

a) Identify racism as across the spectrum. This means we must have some sound bite examples of racism on the left. Anyone?

b) Point out the respect and leadership positions held by TP voices such as *Zo*Herbert Cain*Thomas Sowell*Dr. Ben Carson*Allen West*Clarence Thomas (you'll have to be ready to counter the condescension)*Larry Elder*Walter Williams*add you own examples.

BLACK POLITICAL HISTORY: THE UNTOLD STORYNOTE: All answers are "b." - For details visit: www.NBRA.info

1. What Party was founded as the anti-slavery Party and fought to free blacks from slavery?[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party2. What is the Party of Abraham Lincoln who signed the emancipation proclamation that resulted in the Juneteenth celebrations that occur in black communities today?[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party3. What Party passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution granting blacks freedom, citizenship, and the right to vote?[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party4. What Party passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 granting blacks protection from the Black Codes and prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations, and the Party of most blacks prior to the 1960’s, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party5. What is the Party of the founding fathers of the NAACP?[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party6. What is the Party of President Dwight Eisenhower who signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act, sent U.S. troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools, established the Civil Rights Commission in 1958, and appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation?[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party7. What Party, by the greatest percentage, passed the Civil Rights Acts of the 1950’s and 1960’s?[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party8. What is the Party of President Richard Nixon who instituted the first Affirmative Action program in 1969 with the Philadelphia Plan that established goals and timetables, a plan crafted by black Republican Art Fletcher?[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party9. What is the Party of President George W. Bush who appointed more blacks to high-level positions than any president in history and who spent record money on education, job training and health care to help black Americans prosper?[ ] a. Democratic Party [ ] b. Republican Party10. What Party fought to keep blacks in slavery and was the Party of the Ku Klux Klan?[ ] a. Republican Party [ ] b. Democratic Party11. What Party from 1870 to 1930 used fraud, whippings, lynching, murder, intimidation, and mutilation to get the black vote, and passed the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws which legalized racial discrimination and denied blacks civil rights?[ ] a. Republican Party [ ] b. Democratic Party12. What is the Party of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Harry Truman who rejected anti-lynching laws and efforts to establish a permanent Civil Rights Commission?[ ] a. Republican Party [ ] b. Democratic Party13. What is the Party of President Lyndon Johnson, who called Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “that [N-word] preacher” because he opposed the Viet Nam War; and President John F. Kennedy who voted against the 1957 Civil Rights law as a Senator, then as president opposed Dr. King’s 1963 March on Washington and had Dr. King investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a communist?[ ] a. Republican Party [ ] b. Democratic Party14. What is the Party of the late Senators Robert Byrd who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, former Governor Ernest “Fritz” Hollings who hoisted the Confederate flag over the state capitol in South Carolina , and the late Senator Ted Kennedy who called black judicial “Neanderthals” while blocking their appointments?[ ] a. Republican Party [ ] b. Democratic Party15. What is the Party of President Bill Clinton who refused to send troops to Rwanda to save 800,000 blacks from being killed in 1994, vetoed the welfare reform law twice before signing it, and refused to comply with a court order to have shipping companies stop discriminating against blacks and develop an Affirmative Action Plan?[ ] a. Republican Party [ ] b. Democratic Party16. What Party is against school choice opportunity scholarships that would help poor blacks get out of failing schools and takes the black vote for granted without ever acknowledging their racist past or apologizing for trying to expand slavery, lynching blacks and passing the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws that caused great harm to blacks?[ ] a. Republican Party [ ] b. Democratic Party

It needs to be seen to be believed. Fraud like this should result in firings if Think Progress wishes to retain any modicum of credibility, even amongst its supporters.

byBob Owens

Bio

July 16, 2010 - 8:44 am

We tell lies when we are afraid … afraid of what we don’t know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger. – Tad Williams

Oh, my dear progressive friends … will you ever learn?

Think Progress is an unofficial auxiliary of the Democratic Party, apparently run with the singular purpose of generating reams of dubious (and sometimes shockingly bad) propaganda. One of their more recent abortive efforts was to fabricate a video that they they would like to use as evidence supporting the popular left-wing meme that the growing tea party movement is chock-full of racists. Here it is.

How bad is it?

Put it this way: Think Progress made the following statement yesterday afternoon in their original article:

Think Progress has produced a short video demonstrating the vile racism that has been exhibited at some Tea Party events:

DENNIS: The Tea Party does not focus on the pigment of people’s skin.

[...]

TEA PARTY ACTIVIST 1: He’s too black to be President.

TEA PARTY ACTIVIST 2: I’m a proud racist, I’m white.

TEA PARTY ACTIVIST 3: Afro-Leninism! Coming to you on a silver platter, Barack Hussein Obama!

TEA PARTY ACTIVIST 4: Go home wetbacks!

There are four men quoted in the original 53-second video.

Activist 1 is being smeared as a racist by Think Progress, even though he was attending a tea party event with his black wife and bi-racial son. It takes a lot of nerve to edit a video so dishonestly that what remains is the opposite of what the speaker intended. Here is what Activist 1 actually said in the full video recording:

Barack Obama’s just a bad guy. That’s all I can say. He’s … he’s too black to be president. And you look at the color of my wife, it’s not the color of his skin that troubles me, it’s not the blackness of his skin that troubles me.

It’s the blackness inside … his heart. He’s a bad guy.

Think Progress takes an obviously not racist man and edits him into a villain.

Reprehensible.

Activist 2 is a favorite of Think Progress, and no wonder: he says exactly what they hoped to hear a tea partier say, exclaiming: “I’m a proud racist, I’m white.” Think Progress liked this clip so much they played it not once, but twice.

The problem is, Activist 2 isn’t a tea party protester. He is a tea party crasher.

Think Progress is well aware of this, as they pulled the few seconds of video from a nearly six-minute video of actual tea party protesters singling him out for scorn and chasing him away!

Nice outfit, don’t you think? The man is in fact likely a progressive plant, possibly from that day’s failed “Crash the Tea Party” movement. Note that his Nazi shirt is just out of the package, wrinkled and heavily creased across the fold from shipping. This man was isolated by real tea party protesters, holding signs like the one above, from the moment he showed up.

Think Progress pulled the video of him claiming “I’m racist, I’m white” from the 53-second mark of a nearly six-minute video from conservative blog SharpElbows.Net. The video is entitled: “Proof that the Tea Party is not racist.” It consists of real tea party protesters chasing the man away, and provides a link to where the man bought some of his Nazi gear online.

There is literally no way that Think Progress staffers, using a nearly six-minute video of tea party protesters berating a mail order Nazi and likely progressive plant, could watch this video and come to any conclusion other than that tea party protesters revile racism.

Activist 3 is a little more perplexing. I’m not sure what he means by “Afro-Leninism.” Possibly, it is a reference to the 20 years Barack Obama spent as an eager congregant at Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church, which preaches a racist Marxist liberation theology. But I don’t know, and objectively, neither does Think Progress. No intellectually honest person could make the claim that Activist 3 is a racist from his video.

Activist 4?

He is the reason the original 53-second Think Progress video has shrunk down to an even more anemic 50 seconds.

His brief — inarguably racist — shout of “Go home wetbacks!” is provably a video from 2006.

Years before the tea party existed.

To their credit, Think Progress eventually took down Activist 4’s information.

The remainder of the Think Progress video included several still photos that are intended to provide weak evidence of racism. But once again, the pictures include progressives captured (poorly) masquerading as tea party protesters. These pictures are undeniably of participants of the farcical “Crash the Tea Party” attempt on Boston Common.

Think Progress has committed blatant — and easily falsifiable — fraud. They’ve misrepresented the views of good and decent people.

Painting the father of a multi-racial family as a bigot by twisting his words? Despicable.

Presenting liberal agent provocateurs as real and reprehensible members of a group they intend to undermine by any means necessary? Using video they undoubtedly know proves their contentions false when viewed in its entirety?

Revolting.

Reality would not provide them with the propaganda they sought to exploit for their own political gain. So they invented it.

Real journalists would be fired on the spot for this behavior. The willful perversion of the SharpElbows.net video should end careers.

According to Think Progress’ “About Us” page, Faiz Shakir is vice president at the Center for American Progress and serves as editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress.org. He sets the standards for this group.

Lee Fang, the Think Progress “researcher” that bylines this video, has interned with a similar propaganda site named Media Matters.

In just 53 seconds, they’ve created propaganda so blatantly dishonest as to make their termination mandatory. They’ve abused their readers, and their opponents.

"I don't follow you here. The Tea Party is supposed to be the libertarian wing of the GOP, is it not?

CCP,

I don't see the Tea Party as the wing of another party. It is a separate party and I don't see it as the Libertarian wing though it is closer to that in ideology.

My point is that the jerk who made this statement runs for three different parties. If he could get elected he would be just fine being a Democrat. And we would not have heard it from the Huffington Post.

In any case the Tea Party does indeed need to vet its candidates better. No disagreement about that.

From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994, by Dan T. Carter.

A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, by David L. Chappell.

The Emerging Republican Majority, by Kevin Phillips.

A myth about conservatism is circulating in academia and journalism and has spread to the 2004 presidential campaign. It goes something like this: the Republican Party assembled a national majority by winning over Southern white voters; Southern white voters are racist; therefore, the GOP is racist. Sometimes the conclusion is softened, and Republicans are convicted merely of base opportunism: the GOP is the party that became willing to pander to racists. Either way, today's Republican Party—and by extension the conservative movement at its heart—supposedly has revealed something terrible about itself.

This myth is not the only viewpoint in scholarly debates on the subject. But it is testimony to its growing influence that it is taken aboard by writers like Dan Carter, a prize-winning biographer of George Wallace, and to a lesser extent by the respected students of the South, Earl and Merle Black. It is so pervasive in mass media reporting on racial issues that an NBC news anchor can casually speak of "a new era for the Republican Party, one in which racial intolerance really won't be tolerated." It has become a staple of Democratic politicians like Howard Dean, who accuses Republicans of "dividing Americans against each other, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people" through the use of so-called racist "codewords." All this matters because people use such putative connections to form judgments, and "racist" is as toxic a reputation as one can have in U.S. politics. Certainly the 2000 Bush campaign went to a lot of trouble to combat the GOP's reputation as racially exclusionary. I even know young Republicans who fear that behind their party's victories lies a dirty, not-so-little Southern secret.

Now to be sure, the GOP had a Southern strategy. Willing to work with, rather than against, the grain of Southern opinion, local Republicans ran some segregationist candidates in the 1960s. And from the 1950s on, virtually all national and local GOP candidates tried to craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes of some pretty unsavory characters. This record is incontestable. It is also not much of a story—that a party acted expediently in an often nasty political context.

The new myth is much bolder than this. It insists that these events should decisively shape our understanding of conservatism and the modern Republican Party. Dan Carter writes that today's conservatism must be traced directly back to the "politics of rage" that George Wallace blended from "racial fear, anticommunism, cultural nostalgia, and traditional right-wing economics." Another scholar, Joseph Aistrup, claims that Reagan's 1980 Southern coalition was "the reincarnation of the Wallace movement of 1968." For the Black brothers, the GOP had once been the "party of Abraham Lincoln," but it became the "party of Barry Goldwater," opposed to civil rights and black interests. It is only a short step to the Democrats' insinuation that the GOP is the latest exploiter of the tragic, race-based thread of U.S. history. In short, the GOP did not merely seek votes expediently; it made a pact with America's devil.

The mythmakers typically draw on two types of evidence. First, they argue that the GOP deliberately crafted its core messages to accommodate Southern racists. Second, they find proof in the electoral pudding: the GOP captured the core of the Southern white backlash vote. But neither type of evidence is very persuasive. It is not at all clear that the GOP's policy positions are sugar-coated racist appeals. And election results show that the GOP became the South's dominant party in the least racist phase of the region's history, and got—and stays—that way as the party of the upwardly mobile, more socially conservative, openly patriotic middle-class, not of white solidarity.

Let's start with policies. Like many others, Carter and the Black brothers argue that the GOP appealed to Southern racism not explicitly but through "coded" racial appeals. Carter is representative of many when he says that Wallace's racialism can be seen, varying in style but not substance, in "Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, in Richard Nixon's subtle manipulation of the busing issue, in Ronald Reagan's genial demolition of affirmative action, in George Bush's use of the Willie Horton ads, and in Newt Gingrich's demonization of welfare mothers."

The problem here is that Wallace's segregationism was obviously racist, but these other positions are not obviously racist. This creates an analytic challenge that these authors do not meet. If an illegitimate viewpoint (racism) is hidden inside another viewpoint, that second view—to be a useful hiding place—must be one that can be held for entirely legitimate (non-racist) reasons. Conservative intellectuals might not always linger long enough on the fact that opposition to busing and affirmative action can be disguised racism. On the other hand, these are also positions that principled non-racists can hold. To be persuasive, claims of coding must establish how to tell which is which. Racial coding is often said to occur when voters are highly prone to understanding a non-racist message as a proxy for something else that is racist. This may have happened in 1964, when Goldwater, who neither supported segregation nor called for it, employed the term "states' rights," which to many whites in the Deep South implied the continuation of Jim Crow.

The problem comes when we try to extend this forward. Black and Black try to do this by showing that Nixon and Reagan crafted positions on busing, affirmative action, and welfare reform in a political climate in which many white voters doubted the virtues of preferential hiring, valued individual responsibility, and opposed busing as intrusive. To be condemned as racist "code," the GOP's positions would have to come across as proxies for these views -and in turn these views would have to be racist. The problem is that these views are not self-evidently racist. Many scholars simply treat them as if they were. Adding insult to injury, usually they don't even pause to identify when views like opposition to affirmative action would not be racist.

In effect, these critics want to have it both ways: they acknowledge that these views could in principle be non-racist (otherwise they wouldn't be a "code" for racism) but suggest they never are in practice (and so can be reliably treated as proxies for racism). The result is that their claims are non-falsifiable because they are tautological: these views are deemed racist because they are defined as racist. This amounts to saying that opposition to the policies favored by today's civil rights establishment is a valid indicator of racism. One suspects these theorists would, quite correctly, insist that people can disagree with the Israeli government without being in any way anti-Semitic. But they do not extend the same distinction to this issue. This is partisanship posturing as social science.

The Southern Strategy

This bias is evident also in how differently they treat the long Democratic dominance of the South. Carter and the Black brothers suggest that the accommodation of white racism penetrates to the very soul of modern conservatism. But earlier generations of openly segregationist Southerners voted overwhelmingly for Woodrow Wilson's and Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic Party, which relaxed its civil rights stances accordingly. This coalition passed much of the New Deal legislation that remains the basis of modern liberalism. So what does the segregationist presence imply for the character of liberalism at its electoral and legislative apogee? These scholars sidestep the question by simply not discussing it. This silence implies that racism and liberalism were simply strange political bedfellows, without any common values.

But the commonality, the philosophical link, is swiftly identified once the Democrats leave the stage. In study after study, authors say that "racial and economic conservatism" married white Southerners to the GOP after 1964. So whereas historically accidental events must have led racists to vote for good men like FDR, after 1964 racists voted their conscience. How convenient. And how easy it would be for, say, a libertarian conservative like Walter Williams to generate a counter-narrative that exposes statism as the philosophical link between segregation and liberalism's economic populism.

Yet liberal commentators commit a further, even more obvious, analytic error. They assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up voting Republican in the 1970s and beyond, it had to be because Republicans went to the segregationist mountain, rather than the mountain coming to them. There are two reasons to question this assumption. The first is the logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually have little choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at best the lesser of two evils, one that offers them little of what they truly desire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968, when Wallace won less than 9% of the electoral college and Nixon became president anyway, without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limited national bargaining power. In the end, not the Deep South but the GOP was the mountain.

Second, this was borne out in how little the GOP had to "offer," so to speak, segregationists for their support after 1968, even according to the myth's own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP, they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason these policies aren't plausible codes for real racism is that they aren't the equivalents of discrimination, much less of segregation.

Why did segregationists settle for these policies rather than continue to vote Democratic? The GOP's appeal was mightily aided by none other than the Democratic Party itself, which was lurching leftward in the 1970s, becoming, as the contemporary phrase had it, the party of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." Among other things, the Democrats absorbed a civil rights movement that was itself expanding, and thus diluting, its agenda to include economic redistributionism, opposition to the Vietnam War, and Black Power. The many enthusiasms of the new Democratic Party drove away suburban middle-class voters almost everywhere in the country, not least the South.

Given that trend, the GOP did not need to become the party of white solidarity in order to attract more voters. The fact that many former Wallace supporters ended up voting Republican says a lot less about the GOP than it does about segregationists' collapsing political alternatives. Kevin Phillips was hardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. He wrote in 1969 that Nixon did not "have to bid much ideologically" to get Wallace's electorate, given its limited power, and that moderation was far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching a racialist strategy. While "the Republican Party cannot go to the Deep South"—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whites there seemed to desire most—"the Deep South must soon go to the national GOP," regardless.

Electoral Patterns

In all these ways, the gop appears as the national party of the middle-class, not of white solidarity. And it is this interpretation, and not the myth, that is supported by the voting results. The myth's proponents highlight, and distort, a few key electoral facts: Southern white backlash was most heated in the 1960s, especially in the Deep South. It was then and there that the GOP finally broke through in the South, on the strength of Goldwater's appeals to states' rights. Democrats never again won the votes of most Southern whites. So Goldwater is said to have provided the electoral model for the GOP.

But hidden within these aggregate results are patterns that make no sense if white solidarity really was the basis for the GOP's advance. These patterns concern which Southern votes the GOP attracted, and when. How did the GOP's Southern advance actually unfold? We can distinguish between two sub-regions. The Peripheral South—Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas—contained many growing, urbanizing "New South" areas and much smaller black populations. Race loomed less large in its politics. In the more rural, and poorer, Deep South—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana —black communities were much larger, and racial conflict was much more acute in the 1950s and '60s. Tellingly, the presidential campaigns of Strom Thurmond, Goldwater, and Wallace all won a majority of white votes in the Deep South but lost the white vote in the Peripheral South.

The myth that links the GOP with racism leads us to expect that the GOP should have advanced first and most strongly where and when the politics of white solidarity were most intense. The GOP should have entrenched itself first among Deep South whites and only later in the Periphery. The GOP should have appealed at least as much, if not more, therefore, to the less educated, working-class whites who were not its natural voters elsewhere in the country but who were George Wallace's base. The GOP should have received more support from native white Southerners raised on the region's traditional racism than from white immigrants to the region from the Midwest and elsewhere. And as the Southern electorate aged over the ensuing decades, older voters should have identified as Republicans at higher rates than younger ones raised in a less racist era.

Each prediction is wrong. The evidence suggests that the GOP advanced in the South because it attracted much the same upwardly mobile (and non-union) economic and religious conservatives that it did elsewhere in the country.

Take presidential voting. Under FDR, the Democrats successfully assembled a daunting, cross-regional coalition of presidential voters. To compete, the GOP had to develop a broader national outreach of its own, which meant adding a Southern strategy to its arsenal. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower took his campaign as national hero southward. He, like Nixon in 1960, polled badly among Deep South whites. But Ike won four states in the Peripheral South. This marked their lasting realignment in presidential voting. From 1952 to the Clinton years, Virginia reverted to the Democrats only once, Florida and Tennessee twice, and Texas—except when native-son LBJ was on the ballot—only twice, narrowly. Additionally, since 1952, North Carolina has consistently either gone Republican or come within a few percentage points of doing so.

In other words, states representing over half the South's electoral votes at the time have been consistently in play from 1952 on—since before Brown v. Board of Education, before Goldwater, before busing, and when the Republicans were the mainstay of civil rights bills. It was this which dramatically changed the GOP's presidential prospects. The GOP's breakthrough came in the least racially polarized part of the South. And its strongest supporters most years were "New South" urban and suburban middle- and upper-income voters. In 1964, as we've seen, Goldwater did the opposite: winning in the Deep South but losing the Peripheral South. But the pre-Goldwater pattern re-emerged soon afterward. When given the option in 1968, Deep South whites strongly preferred Wallace, and Nixon became president by winning most of the Peripheral South instead. From 1972 on, GOP presidential candidates won white voters at roughly even rates in the two sub-regions, sometimes slightly more in the Deep South, sometimes not. But by then, the Deep South had only about one-third of the South's total electoral votes; so it has been the Periphery, throughout, that provided the bulk of the GOP's Southern presidential support.

* * *

The GOP's congressional gains followed the same pattern. Of course, it was harder for Republicans to win in Deep South states where Democratic-leaning black electorates were larger. But even when we account for that, the GOP became the dominant party of white voters much earlier in the Periphery than it did in the Deep South. Before Goldwater, the GOP's few Southern House seats were almost all in the Periphery (as was its sole Senator—John Tower of Texas). Several Deep South House members were elected with Goldwater but proved ephemeral, as Black and Black note: "Republicans lost ground and stalled in the Deep South for the rest of the decade," while in the Periphery they "continued to make incremental gains." In the 1960s and '70s, nearly three-quarters of GOP House victories were in the Peripheral rather than the Deep South, with the GOP winning twice as often in urban as rural districts. And six of the eight different Southern Republican Senators elected from 1961 to 1980 were from the Peripheral South. GOP candidates tended consistently to draw their strongest support from the more educated, middle- and upper-income white voters in small cities and suburbs. In fact, Goldwater in 1964—at least his Deep South performance, which is all that was controversial in this regard—was an aberration, not a model for the GOP.

Writers who vilify the GOP's Southern strategy might be surprised to find that all of this was evident, at least in broad brush-strokes, to the strategy's early proponents. In his well-known book, Kevin Phillips drew the lesson that a strong appeal in the Deep South, on the model of 1964, had already entailed and would entail defeat for the GOP everywhere else, including in what he termed the Outer South. He therefore rejected such an approach. He emphasized that Ike and Nixon did far better in the Peripheral South. He saw huge opportunities in the "youthful middle-class" of Texas, Florida, and other rapidly growing and changing Sun Belt states, where what he called "acutely Negrophobe politics" was weakest, not strongest. He thus endorsed "evolutionary success in the Outer South" as the basis of the GOP's "principal party strategy" for the region, concluding that this would bring the Deep South along in time, but emphatically on the national GOP's terms, not the segregationists'.

The tension between the myth and voting data escalates if we consider change across time. Starting in the 1950s, the South attracted millions of Midwesterners, Northeasterners, and other transplants. These "immigrants" identified themselves as Republicans at higher rates than native whites. In the 1980s, up to a quarter of self-declared Republicans in Texas appear to have been such immigrants. Furthermore, research consistently shows that identification with the GOP is stronger among the South's younger rather than older white voters, and that each cohort has also became more Republican with time. Do we really believe immigrants (like George H.W. Bush, who moved with his family to Texas) were more racist than native Southerners, and that younger Southerners identified more with white solidarity than did their elders, and that all cohorts did so more by the 1980s and '90s than they had earlier?

In sum, the GOP's Southern electorate was not rural, nativist, less educated, afraid of change, or concentrated in the most stagnant parts of the Deep South. It was disproportionately suburban, middle-class, educated, younger, non-native-Southern, and concentrated in the growth-points that were, so to speak, the least "Southern" parts of the South. This is a very strange way to reincarnate George Wallace's movement.

The Decline of Racism

Timing may provide the greatest gap between the myth and the actual unfolding of events. Only in the 1980s did more white Southerners self-identify as Republicans than as Democrats, and only in the mid-1990s did Republicans win most Southern House seats and become competitive in most state legislatures. So if the GOP's strength in the South only recently reached its zenith, and if its appeal were primarily racial in nature, then the white Southern electorate (or at least most of it) would have to be as racist as ever. But surely one of the most important events in Southern political history is the long-term decline of racism among whites. The fact that these (and many other) books suggest otherwise shows that the myth is ultimately based on a demonization not of the GOP but of Southerners, who are indeed assumed to have Confederate flags in their hearts if not on their pickups. This view lends The Rise of Southern Republicans a schizophrenic nature: it charts numerous changes in the South, but its organizing categories are predicated on the unsustainable assumption that racial views remain intact.

What's more, the trend away from confident beliefs in white supremacy may have begun earlier than we often think. David Chappell, a historian of religion, argues that during the height of the civil rights struggle, segregationists were denied the crucial prop of religious legitimacy. Large numbers of pastors of diverse denominations concluded that there was no Biblical foundation for either segregation or white superiority. Although many pastors remained segregationist anyway, the official shift was startling: "Before the Supreme Court's [Brown v. Board] decision of 1954, the southern Presbyterians. . . and, shortly after the decision, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) overwhelmingly passed resolutions supporting desegregation and calling on all to comply with it peacefully. . . . By 1958 all SBC seminaries accepted black applicants." With considerable understatement, Chappell notes that "people—even historians—are surprised to hear this." Billy Graham, the most prominent Southern preacher, was openly integrationist.

The point of all this is not to deny that Richard Nixon may have invited some nasty fellows into his political bed. The point is that the GOP finally became the region's dominant party in the least racist phase of the South's entire history, and it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region's growing and confident communities—not its declining and fearful ones. The myth's shrillest proponents are as reluctant to admit this as they are to concede that most Republicans genuinely believe that a color-blind society lies down the road of individual choice and dynamic change, not down the road of state regulation and unequal treatment before the law. The truly tenacious prejudices here are the mythmakers'.

I'm a little confused here, GM. I said that you ignore party realignment. You say I propagate a myth, and then, in an effort to prove me wrong, include as evidence an article that explicitly says that there was a shift in party alignments between the creation of the KKK and the present?

"Under FDR, the Democrats successfully assembled a daunting, cross-regional coalition of presidential voters. To compete, the GOP had to develop a broader national outreach of its own, which meant adding a Southern strategy to its arsenal. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower took his campaign as national hero southward. He, like Nixon in 1960, polled badly among Deep South whites. But Ike won four states in the Peripheral South. This marked their lasting realignment in presidential voting."

"Of course, it was harder for Republicans to win in Deep South states where Democratic-leaning black electorates were larger. But even when we account for that, the GOP became the dominant party of white voters much earlier in the Periphery than it did in the Deep South."

My thought is that there are racist element across the political spectrum. This includes the Tea Party.

There is now a coordinated campaign to sink the Tea Party as a socially acceptable position by a) making shit up and b) finding occasional outliers like the bigoted idiot under discussion here this morning.

What to do?

My thoughts:a) Identify racism as across the spectrum. This means we must have some sound bite examples of racism on the left. Anyone? b) Point out the respect and leadership positions held by TP voices such as *Zo*Herbert Cain*Thomas Sowell*Dr. Ben Carson*Allen West*Clarence Thomas (you'll have to be ready to counter the condescension)*Larry Elder*Walter Williams*add you own examples.

I despise group politics but that is the battlefield we play on. I agree with the points above. First I would ignore race and move beyond race, as we mostly have. Secondly and simultaneously I would go in and go after all the pet Dem groups, refute their failed messages and chip away at their support. The Obama/liberal agenda has been horrible for the economics and families of blacks, Hispanics, gays, young people, women. Not more freebies, but live and raise your kids in a better, more prosperous society with lower unemployment and expanded opportunities. Get a message, and go to their media, their neighborhoods, etc. and make the case. Marketers know who they are how to reach them. A 4% switch of allegiance is an 8% shift in the vote, enough to swing back even a so-called landslide election. That is attainable; look at the persuasive capability just within the list above. With gains in these groups comes improvement with independents and moderates who don't want to be seen as siding with racists and extremists. The Obama campaign called it competing in all 50 states. In order to win 51%, we need to compete in every venue for every vote.

I'm a little confused here, GM. I said that you ignore party realignment. You say I propagate a myth, and then, in an effort to prove me wrong, include as evidence an article that explicitly says that there was a shift in party alignments between the creation of the KKK and the present?

"Under FDR, the Democrats successfully assembled a daunting, cross-regional coalition of presidential voters. To compete, the GOP had to develop a broader national outreach of its own, which meant adding a Southern strategy to its arsenal. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower took his campaign as national hero southward. He, like Nixon in 1960, polled badly among Deep South whites. But Ike won four states in the Peripheral South. This marked their lasting realignment in presidential voting."

"Of course, it was harder for Republicans to win in Deep South states where Democratic-leaning black electorates were larger. But even when we account for that, the GOP became the dominant party of white voters much earlier in the Periphery than it did in the Deep South."

The lie is that today's republicans are yesterdays racebaiting democrats. The dems use race hatred today just as they've always done. The republicans have always been anti-slavery, once it was plantations, now it's big government feeding on captive voting blocs.

I'm a little confused here, GM. I said that you ignore party realignment. You say I propagate a myth, and then, in an effort to prove me wrong, include as evidence an article that explicitly says that there was a shift in party alignments between the creation of the KKK and the present?

"Under FDR, the Democrats successfully assembled a daunting, cross-regional coalition of presidential voters. To compete, the GOP had to develop a broader national outreach of its own, which meant adding a Southern strategy to its arsenal. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower took his campaign as national hero southward. He, like Nixon in 1960, polled badly among Deep South whites. But Ike won four states in the Peripheral South. This marked their lasting realignment in presidential voting."

"Of course, it was harder for Republicans to win in Deep South states where Democratic-leaning black electorates were larger. But even when we account for that, the GOP became the dominant party of white voters much earlier in the Periphery than it did in the Deep South."

The lie is that today's republicans are yesterdays racebaiting democrats. The dems use race hatred today just as they've always done. The republicans have always been anti-slavery, once it was plantations, now it's big government feeding on captive voting blocs.

That's not what you seemed to say earlier. And now it is a lie, not a myth? I thought you said words have meaning?

They both apply. Dems still using the klan to try to scare minorities into submission hasn't changed, the new spin is the Rev. Wright/Farrakhan/NBPP hatred our president was shaped by. The hatred fueling violence in our country today that our professional media won't cover.

No. Republicans have always been anti-slavery from the start and helped shape America for the better. The civil rights legislation the republicans pushed through despite the efforts of dems made this a better nation.

No. Republicans have always been anti-slavery from the start and helped shape America for the better. The civil rights legislation the republicans pushed through despite the efforts of dems made this a better nation.

So, you posted an article as evidence that noted that there was a realignment, but don't believe it yourself?

Tomorrow is yet another day for Congress to decide whether they are going to stand with the American people or whether they are going to live above the law that they forced onto the American people. Will they live under Obamacare - the law they passed against the will of the American people - or do they claim the exemption granted unilaterally by President Obama?

Politico is reporting that members of Congress have the option of deeming their employees as "official" or not "official" to determine whether or not they are forced to enter the exchanges.1 Rep. Darrell Issa says he can just deem all of his staff as not "official" to avoid his staff from being forced to live under the law like anyone else. However, even those that will be forced into the exchanges can still receive a taxpayer subsidy that section 1512 of the "Affordable Care Act" outlaws for other Americans enrolled in the exchanges.2

All Senators and Representatives must decide tomorrow, by 5PM eastern. This is just another case of the ruling elite creating loop-holes for themselves so that they can live above the laws that they force on the American people. We have repeatedly said Obamacare must be repealed and we stand by that. Sure, we can make phone calls to urge them not to create special exemptions for themselves and to instead move to repeal, defund, or delay the entire law, but will they listen? Most of them likely won't.

This is why it is important for us to now turn our focus on what we can do that will have a meaningful impact on reining in the elitism and corruption in DC.

Over the next several months and as we move into the 2014 cycle, Tea Party Patriots will have several volunteer opportunities that will build up to having a meaningful impact. These activities include everything from going door to door to engaging in our cause online. We are calling this team the "Rapid Response Team" and we want to know how you would like to be a part of this team. This team of activists is going to lay the ground work for saving our country.

JOIN THE RAPID RESPONSE TEAM NOW

This team goes beyond Congressional exemptions and bad policy; it is a mobilization of patriots across the country for all things Tea Party. Joining the Rapid Response Team will enable you to receive action alerts on the things that matter most to you.

We have already shown Washington D.C. time and time again that government serves We The People, not the other way around. The Tea Party has been successful enough to drive attacks from the Mainstream Media, Senators, Representatives, and our own President. If they didn't fear us, they wouldn't even talk about us. But we still have more work to do.

You can be part of the Tea Party’s response team and help us make history once again. Join the Rapid Response Team today!

No. Republicans have always been anti-slavery from the start and helped shape America for the better. The civil rights legislation the republicans pushed through despite the efforts of dems made this a better nation.

So, you posted an article as evidence that noted that there was a realignment, but don't believe it yourself?

You are genuinely amazing, GM.

I guess your academic indoctrination is disrupting your ability to read. You can't seem to grasp that the geneational cohort and demographics shift occurred and not the leftist lie that the racist democrats became republicans.

Sadly, Democrats have managed to trick a lot of black Americans into believing that the GOP is a racist party. But, in truth, the Democratic Party was, is, and will likely continue to be the home of far more racists than the GOP. Let me explain why I say that.

To begin with, the Republican Party was founded by anti-slavery activists, in contrast to the pro-slavery Democratic Party. It was Abe Lincoln, a Republican President, who led the North to victory in the Civil War and freed the slaves while the Democrats did everything in their power to keep black Americans down.

Fast forward to 1898 in Wilmington, N.C., where Democrats murdered black Republicans so they could stage, “the nation’s only recorded coup d’etat.” Then, in 1922, Democrats in the Senate filibustered a Republican attempt to make lynching a federal crime. A little later on, FDR nominated former Klansman Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. Contrast that to Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, who actually “sent troops” to ensure that schools in Little Rock, Ark., were desegregated and ordered the “complete desegregation of the Armed Forces.” Noticing any trends?

But, that was such a long time ago, right? Things really changed in the ’60s, didn’t they? Yes, Americans — particularly black Americans — really owe Democratic President Lyndon Johnson a debt of gratitude for destroying American families and causing the number of illegitimate births to skyrocket — by pushing entitlement programs that made it much easier to have children out of wedlock.

Remember George “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” Wallace standing in the door of an Alabama schoolhouse to keep black children from being able to go to school with whites? George Wallace was a Democrat. Remember Bull Connor turning water hoses and dogs on civil rights protestors? Bull Connor was a Democrat.

But, what about the revolutionary Civil Rights Act of 1964? That’s where the Democrats showed their mettle and Republicans were proven to be racists. Right? Wrong. 82% of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 versus only 64% of Democrats. Furthermore, a few years later, it was Republican Richard Nixon who first put teeth behind affirmative action.

But, what about today? You’d think that with Democrats receiving upwards of 90% of the black vote in some cases, that there would be few, if any, prominent black Republicans while black Americans would be amongst the biggest power players in the Democratic Party. However, the opposite has often turned out to be true. Once you look past the gerrymandered districts that have to remain in place because so many liberal whites simply won’t vote for black candidates (There are only five black Democrats in the House representing majority white districts), you’ll see that the Republican Party has surpassed the Democrats in many areas.

Who’s the only black American currently on the Supreme Court? Clarence Thomas. The first black Secretary of State? Colin Powell. The first black woman ever to be a Secretary of State? Condi Rice.

Who’s one of the fill-ins for the most popular conservative radio host on earth, Rush Limbaugh? Walter Williams. The most desired 2008 nominee as selected by the right side of the blogosphere in 2006? Condi Rice. Who did those same bloggers select as the most desired nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor when she retired? Janice Rogers Brown tied for first place.

Meanwhile, what do we see from Democrats? We see Oreo cookies being thrown at Maryland’s black U.S. Senate candidate Michael Steele and black Republicans being called “Uncle Toms” and compared to “Aunt Jemima.”

Moreover, let’s take a look at a couple of studies that actually set out to compare how racist Republicans and Democrats actually are. First off, a professor from Yale looked at voting patterns and she found that:

“…(W)hite Republicans nationally are 25 percentage points more likely on average to vote for the Democratic senatorial candidate when the GOP hopeful is black. …In House races, white Democrats are 38 percentage points less likely to vote Democratic if their candidate is black.”

It would have been interesting for them to poll black Republicans and Democrats as well, for comparison’s sake, but however you slice it, there are a lot more white Democrats than white Republicans willing to defect to the other side rather than vote for a black candidate.

Then there is another study, this time from a professor at Stanford — of how much government largesse Democrats and Republicans believe people deserved to be given after Katrina — and, surprise, surprise: Democrats behaved in a racist fashion while Republicans didn’t:

“But for Democrats, race mattered — and in a disturbing way. Overall, Democrats were willing to give whites about $1,500 more than they chose to give to a black or other minority….” Republicans are likely to be more stringent, both in terms of money and time, Iyengar said. “However, their position is ‘principled’ in the sense that it stems from a strong belief in individualism (as opposed to handouts). Thus their responses to the assistance questions are relatively invariant across the different media conditions. Independents and Democrats, on the other hand, are more likely to be affected by racial cues.”

Here’s the reality: there are racists in both parties. But, there are a lot more of them in the Democratic Party and there always have been. But ironically, Democrats have managed to use the GOP’s belief in a colorblind America against us. Because so many Democrats have no problem with using racial discrimination for political purposes, they’ll support policies like reparations, Affirmative Action, and racial quotas that Republicans simply won’t. Then they deftly distort and exploit incidents like the Katrina rescue efforts and Bill Bennett’s condemnation of the idea that black babies could be aborted to reduce the crime rate to convince black Americans that the GOP hates black Americans.

This is all despite the fact that for a large number of black Americans, the GOP is a much better fit than the Democratic Party. The GOP is the party that’s friendly to religion, anti-abortion, against gay marriage, tough on crime, and for low taxes and school vouchers. Yet, so many black Americans have been deceived into sticking with the Democrats even though the Dems do so many things that are harmful to our country as a whole and to black Americans in particular.

That’s why if you’re a black American who thinks the GOP better represents your views than the Democratic Party, then it’s time to join the Republican Party. Don’t let the Democrats lie to you and tell you that the GOP is full of racists, especially when there are so many distinguished black Americans out there who can tell you otherwise. Look to Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Rod Paige, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Larry Elder, J.C. Watts, Michael Steele, Ken Blackwell, Lynn Swann — and you’ll see that the GOP judges people not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

No. Republicans have always been anti-slavery from the start and helped shape America for the better. The civil rights legislation the republicans pushed through despite the efforts of dems made this a better nation.

So, you posted an article as evidence that noted that there was a realignment, but don't believe it yourself?

You are genuinely amazing, GM.

I guess your academic indoctrination is disrupting your ability to read. You can't seem to grasp that the geneational cohort and demographics shift occurred and not the leftist lie that the racist democrats became republicans.

Man, you are so fing right. Except for the part where the article you submit as evidence fing says that there was a fing realignment.

"Under FDR, the Democrats successfully assembled a daunting, cross-regional coalition of presidential voters. To compete, the GOP had to develop a broader national outreach of its own, which meant adding a Southern strategy to its arsenal. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower took his campaign as national hero southward. He, like Nixon in 1960, polled badly among Deep South whites. But Ike won four states in the Peripheral South. This marked their lasting realignment in presidential voting."

A) the first black Supreme Court nominee was a DemocratB) and was nominated by a DemocratC) and that the presidential candidate that phoned Coretta Scott King to support her jailed husband was a DemocratD) that the first black Secretary of State left the Republican party, after his aide pointed out that the GOP is "full of racists": http://www.nydailynews.com/news/election-2012/powell-aide-gop-full-racists-article-1.1193673E) that suggesting that the vast majority of blacks could be so easily "fooled" Democratic party is demeaning to people's intelligence, and is itself racistF) suggests no actual knowledge about other components of history and politics, such as the incentive to stay with party, even after a realignment, due to seniority norms and benefits in Congress